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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 20, 2026

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) Task: A Simple Cognitive Paradigm to Investigate False Memories in the Laboratory

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) Task: A Simple Cognitive Paradigm to Investigate False Memories in the Laboratory

Published on: January 31, 2017

False memory and level of processing effect: an event-related potential study.

Maria Soledad Beato¹, Angela Boldini, Sara Cadavid

¹Department of Basic Psychology, Psychobiology and Methodology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain. msol@usal.es

|July 20, 2012

Summary

Investigating memory, this study used event-related potentials (ERPs) and the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Deeper processing improved true recall but not false recall, with similar brain patterns for both.

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Last Updated: May 20, 2026

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) Task: A Simple Cognitive Paradigm to Investigate False Memories in the Laboratory

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Published on: January 31, 2017

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Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

Published on: May 9, 2019

Area of Science:

Cognitive Neuroscience
Psychology
Memory Research

Background:

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm is frequently used to study false memories.
Understanding the neural correlates of true and false memory is crucial for cognitive science.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the impact of processing depth on true and false memories using event-related potentials (ERPs).
To examine behavioral and electrophysiological differences between shallow and deep encoding in the DRM paradigm.

Main Methods:

Participants studied word lists using either shallow (letter detection) or deep (mental imagery) processing.
A recognition test assessed true memory for studied words and false memory for critical lures.
Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during the recognition test.

Main Results:

Deep encoding led to significantly higher true recognition compared to shallow encoding.
False recognition of critical lures was similar across both shallow and deep encoding conditions.
ERPs showed similar patterns for true and false recognition, indicating shared underlying neural processes, with shallow encoding eliciting more positive ERPs later in the trial.

Conclusions:

Behavioral differences in true and false memory due to processing depth were observed.
Electrophysiological data suggest that common neural mechanisms underlie both true and false recognition.
The study highlights the dissociation between behavioral and neural measures of memory processing depth.